If you’re a dealer in fish and seafood – and there has to be at least a chance that you are – you will want to read this. In fact, read it anyway, it’s good stuff for our embattled oceans. Basically, Pick n Pay, a great procurer of fish and seafood and a supporter of sustainable fisheries and aquaculture, is upping its game. As of 2016, it will be selling only product which meets its seafood sustainability criteria. Broadly, these criteria involve getting the nod of the Marine Stewardship Council and the WWF-SA’s Southern African Sustainable Seafood Initiative, as well as being involved in some sort of sustainable fisheries or aquaculture project. Recognising that such projects do not always meet the highest criteria of sustainability, PnP has announced its intention to use its buying power as an incentive for it to improve things, by defining its criteria for all the world to see.

Comment: It’s arcane stuff, to be sure. But saving a planet is not all banners and beads.

We’re not sure what to make of this, so we’ll just throw it out there: Shoprite has apparently fallen afoul of the National Credit Regulator, which has referred the Big Red One to the Consumer Tribunal for reckless lending under the National Credit Act. This after the Regulator found that Shoprite Investments and Shoprite Insurance Company sold retrenchment and occupational disability cover to pensioners and old-age grant recipients. It also suspects that these divisions sold retrenchment cover with a waiting period of six months on a six-month loan. The issue, apparently, is that the sale of retrenchment and occupational disability cover to pension grant recipients imposes an “unreasonable cost on them because they cannot claim benefits under these covers. Shoprite has promised to investigate the allegations as soon as it receives the appropriate docs from the Regulator.

Comment: Shoprite has a long-established tradition of being a one-stop shop for everything from rugby tickets to financial products to food. This, it turns out, is not without its pitfalls.

Over in the US, aficionados of the Consumer Packaged Good are pleased from time to time to make their way to Trader Joe’s, a kind of Whole Foods-meets Jimmy Buffett Concert concept, where Dude-esque tellers in Hawaiian shirts will stuff your brown bags full of organic and semi organic, or at least organic-seeming private label goodies, for a lot less than the price of your Whole Paycheck. With us so far? Good, good. Now this is what ambitious Choppies CEO Ramachandran Ottapathu told CNN recently: “I’d like to see Choppies closer to Trader Joe’s in the US. Trader Joe’s has the best private-label offering and high value for money – the same thing we offer – the best value for money.” Trader Joe’s has discovered something precious and rare: that people like their grocery retail to be fun, even a little fantastical, and they will reward the retailer who recognises this fact.

Comment: While the Trader Joe’s concept might be a bridge too far for the local market, a cheap private label wholesaler will not, and that’s a segment of the market in which there is surely room to grow.

On Tuesday last week, our friends Unilever opened its first ice cream factory on this continent we are pleased to call home, a R600million whopper in the portentously-titled (and sustainably arranged) Lords View Industrial Park in Midrand. The factory – 40th of its kind globally – was built under the DTI’s tax allowance incentive scheme, advantage of which Unilever has taken to the tune of a canny R1.9bn since 2011. The scheme has incentivised around 50 manufacturing developments worth a combined R40billion. The factory itself will employ 150 souls from the surrounding area, will harvest rainwater using smart technology, and reduce energy consumption through efficient motors, drive mixers and air compressors.

Comment: Excellent work by a hardworking (and deep-pocketed) Department and a visionary business.

Here’s a story we ourselves have no hope of understanding, but apparently consumer goods giant Nestlé is waiting for the walled gardens of the big five media owners – Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Alibaba – to fall before they go full programmatic on their media buying. What we think this means is that these businesses guard their user data jealously, allowing no client businesses to see it in all its glory. This means that businesses like Nestlé need a different buying strategy for each of them, dependent on the data they release. What Nestlé would like is to aggregate, book, flight, analyze and optimise its media using its own software interfaces and algorithms – and for this reason, they’re not spending all the cash they could for your clicks and glances.

Comment: Deep stuff. But an interesting insight to a vast and powerful industry that is still in its infancy, making things up as it goes along, one pixel at a time.

Cyril Ramaphosa may be the Darling of Business and South Africa’s Next Best Hope, but he didn’t get to where he is right now by cosying up to capital. Well, ok, yes, he did. In fact, he is capital. But he still has stern words for those businesses where inequality is rampant, even when he is addressing attendees at the inaugural Employment Equity Awards, won by the SABC in the public sector and our own, dear Pick n Pay in the private. Look to the example of PPC Cement, he thundered from the rostrum, whose CEO in 2004 took a R1million cut in his pay and froze the salaries of his executives in order to do the right thing by the 1,200 poorest employees. Or the example of the current honorees, who, he said had “grappled with these challenges and… succeeded. For them transformation has become an essential part of their being.”

Comment: Strong stuff, but still sadly necessary. It is a constant mystery to us how otherwise well-run businesses have such a blind spot when it comes to the composition of their leadership.

And speaking of awards, which we were if you had been paying attention, IMPERIAL Logistics has won nine of the things at the 27th annual Logistics Achiever Awards, including a Platinum for the design and implementation of an innovative new production logistics solution for client VW South Africa. Congrats, that eighteen wheeler on the highway to corporate glory.

Having been the recipient of more than one sustainability award, Woolies has decided that it’s time to dish some out. So it has launched the Woolworths Sustainability Award, to be given at the Eat Out Mercedes-Benz Restaurant Awards to a restaurant that serves as an inspiration to both consumers and the food industry, creating greater awareness of responsible shopping and eating. To die for.